Page 71 of Calico Descending

“You’ll stay with Titus.” There’s an unyielding command to his voice, laced with a small bit of anger, and I don’t fight him on it. Instead, I sit back into the seat and wait.

Through the windshield, I watch Valdys disappear inside a cavern.

“What happened to Cadmus?”

“I don’t know,” Titus answers quietly, resting his elbow on the edge of the bashed-out window beside him.

“Where is he?”

“Had to put him in one of those cages in the back.”

“Like the mutations?”

“I had no choice. Valdys thought he might hurt you. Or Neela.”

The thought of him trapped inside that suffocating box feels wrong, somehow. “He saved us back there. If he hadn’t … we would’ve …”

Running a hand down his face, Titus silently confesses his own guilt. “I saw him … tear away one of marauder’s arms. He bit down into it.”

In the silence that follows, I frown at that, trying to imagine such a thing.

“We’re no different than Ragers, or the mutations. The only thing that separates us from them is the small bit of humanity we cling to, and I’m afraid what little is left in Cadmus is slipping away.”

Movement at the mouth of the cavern is Valdys, covered in blood, as he carries something that dangles from his grip. In the path of the truck’s headlights, he tosses the mutation’s head onto the ground, and dread settles over me again.

With an air of abruptness, he throws back the driver door and climbs inside, his arm knocking into me. “She’s gone.” At the flat tone of his voice, I know not to ask any questions.

Tears swell in my eyes, as he shifts the truck in gear and we drive away.

Chapter 31

I unroll the sleeping bag, one of two I managed to scavenge from the back of the truck, onto the dirt beside the fire Titus built. Valdys hands me some of the jerky he found packed away in a box full of supplies and water. After the events of the evening, I don’t have any desire to eat, but I know I’ll need my energy, so I accept his proffered chunk of dried meat and take a sip from a canteen of water.

Sitting against a rock, beside which we’ve taken some measure of shelter, Valdys pulls his knees up and lets out a quiet grunt. I kneel down beside him, examining his new wounds, as Titus lies back on his sleeping bag, across from us, tucking his arms beneath his head.

A wide gash on Valdys’s bicep marks the swipe of a claw, and I reach inside the pack for the emergency kit I saw there.

“Stupid,” he says, as I pull an alcohol swab from the box of medical supplies. “You’d think they’d have had more soldiers to escort the truck.”

Setting the wet swab to his wound, I dab away the small bits of dirt along the jagged edge. “They weren’t transporting the truck to a new facility. They were delivering it to those men.”

Understanding seems to dawn on his face, and he shakes his head. “They wanted them to be set loose.”

“How many hives could those things destroy?”

He sighs, allowing me to twist his arm for the bottom half of the wound. “More than a horde of Ragers, I’d imagine.”

“And the Alphas are the only effective means they have of controlling them. Which means, they’ll be coming for us. For you.”

“Then, we keep driving. First light, we head north. There’s enough gasoline to put us miles from here.”

Once the wound is clean, I nab one of the sutures from the kit, and pass it through the flame, before setting it to the narrow tip of the gash. He doesn’t so much as flinch when I feed the needle into his skin.

“Where’d you learn to sew a wound?”

A smile stretches my lips, as I tug the suture and feed it through again. “I didn’t. My mother taught my sister and I to sew when we were young. Bryani was better at it, though.”

“Younger ones always are,” he says with a knowing smile, and I pause for a moment.

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